What does it mean to have a Luxury Face, or a blue-chip investment face? The potential for luxury is everywhere, even in your blue-genes. Beauty that is aesthetically proportionate, following a golden ratio (Φ), and delivers. How have you chosen to express value?

As contemporary art has become the luxury good for the 1% niche-segment consumer, the issue of luxury is simultaneously presenting itself as fuelling the next wave of global capitalism. The new mode of luxury is creating complex value-systems, but whereas standard luxury goods like watches, jewelry or real estate answer to various conspicuous reasons for consumption, art taps into a different source of connoisseurial consumerism. Expressing its value in multiple forms and legitimized through intellectual enhancement, art is nevertheless also an object of affection, objectified and refined through the same modes of strategic differentiation as the other ‘luxury goods.’ Luxury is a prism of choice, of privilege, that reflects back onto the world, with a promise to enrich our lives.

As non-artists, non-philosophers, and non-specialists we are complicit in the mechanisms of art’s value creation, always laboring under the solarwinds given-off by the artistic gesture. In other words, art is a luxury, and what makes it so is us, it’s you and me, whether you and me are the curator, critic, art market, or all of the above.

A work in progress, Luxury Face at Guccivuitton is the presentation of a research-phase, a visual mindset, a forecasting, that treats the strategic ebbs and flows of art discourse and luxury lifestyle as material for manipulation. What ends up in the exhibition space are things that look like artworks—aesthetic objects of blended image and language with the suggestion of meaning—though unpoliced in a maneuver, perhaps, of intellectual objectification.

Luxury Face is bringing something into the world, diving head first into the fjord of luxury, of nature, of babies and ghosts. Luxury Face, what is it? It’s a vehicle and it’s also I don’t know.

Luxury Face and Guccivuitton would like to give a special thanks to Rolf Hoff. Additional gratitude to Bjørnar Pedersen, Andreas Breivik, Iselin Steiro, Lene Nordermoen and Bleed Oslo.